is himself a patient in this psychiatric hospital: he suffers from paranoia and
extremely low self-esteem. These conditions, which stem from his experience
of watching the white world turn his once strong father into an ineffectual
alcoholic, have led him to pretend to be deaf.
While the implied Kesey guides his audience to these inferences about the
Chief ’s unreliability, he also guides that audience to other inferences that lead
us to recognize that the Chief nevertheless captures some underlying truths
about life on the ward and about Nurse Ratched’s role in that life. First, the
Chief ’s narration effectively conveys the sense that the ward is so set apart
from the world outside its walls that it might as well have its own system of
time, and how, within that system, the subjective experience of time’s pace can
vary radically from day to day. Second, the Chief ’s narration indicates that
Nurse Ratched has a remarkable degree of power, and, in combination with
his reports of her manipulations of patients in group meetings and in many
of her other interactions, this narration leads Kesey’s audience to share the
Chief ’s ethical evaluation of her. The Chief ’s analogy between Nurse Ratched
and the bored kid at the projection machine is particularly telling. In the
Chief ’s view, Nurse Ratched’s motive for easing off “the pace on that clock-
dial” has nothing to do with helping the patients and everything to do with
her own control of them. She eases off only when she perceives that they’re
at the breaking point, and she does so not out of concern for them but in the
same spirit as a child who gets bored by the once-exciting spectacle of watch-
ing a movie projector running at high speed.
More generally, in the Chief ’s view, Nurse Ratched’s control of time on
the ward is part of her larger role in the Combine, the Chief ’s term for all the
societal forces that work to enforce a passive conformity on individuals. The
Chief identifies the ward as a factory for the Combine, a place to fix those who
are resisting the forces of conformity, and he sees Nurse Ratched as the ever-
efficient, ever-dedicated manager of that factory. Again, the implied Kesey
invites his audience to recognize that the Chief is literally unreliable (there is
no Combine) in his understanding but metaphorically reliable in his report-
ing and reading (the ward does function to enforce conformity—at the price
of masculinity, among other things), and reliable in his evaluation (Nurse
Ratched’s manipulations are all in the service of undermining the patients’
self-confidence and self-esteem). The overall effect of the Chief ’s narration is
that the authorial audience interprets his paranoia as a condition that gives him
privileged access to significant metaphorical truths about the narrative world
and a corresponding ability to render accurate ethical evaluations of its inhab-
itants. To put this point in other terms, the Chief is unreliable in his reports
about time on the ward and in his reading of Nurse Ratched’s power, but the
ESTRANgINg UNRELIABILITY, BONDINg UNRELIABILITY • 103